I was living in Silicon Valley working for a startup...4 years out of college. A college friend of mine on the East Coast woke me up at like 730a Pacific time and told me to turn the TV on to any channel and hung up.
Took my brain a couple minutes to wake up and realize this was for-real real.
I was also four years out of college and working for a startup, but living in Oakland with a bunch of punks and weirdos. I remember one roommate running through the house freaking out and we just thought she was being wacky as usual, until we saw the TV
I was in Sunnyvale but the cost there ended up pushing me down south to Gilroy the next year. Gilroy was very much like the town I grew up in Ohio so I really clicked with it, garlic smell and all. Lol
I was in my Marine Corps barracks, 25% of my enlistment done, my dreams of being a high speed badass having subsided to a newfound feeling of lazy independence. I had just worked overnight when this happened.
It was like a bolt of lightning, we were going to war. It wasn't really fear though, I felt pretty righteous. We were American and somebody had just fucked up.
I really miss that feeling of righteousness. Not sure I ever deserved it, but fuck, it did feel good and the case was a lot more believable at the time.
âWe were American, and somebody just fucked upâ
I couldnât say it better tbh. USA gets a lot of hate for a lot of things, but no one really wants to learn why weâre #1. Fuck with our country and we will eradicate your whole ass area for 20 continuous years.
Any country that hasn't committed a genocide of it's indigenous population, hasn't used a nuclear bomb, or doesn't currently use concentration camps and slave labor, maybe? Every state actor has done bad things, but the US has more on its conscience than most (especially if we don't hold nations responsible for the actions of previous governments that no longer exist).
No one should feel righteous lashing out the way we did. There's a reason so many people were against the war even in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.
I was in Oakland, but a sophomore in high school. When I woke up my dad had his clock radio on, and he said some moron flew into a building in New York. I didn't really get it until I got to school where the TV was on. Then we just watched the TV all day...
I was in LA, hungover as fuck, my roommate knocked on my door and said âwake up, weâre getting fucked by terroristsâ
I called my dad and we were on the phone watching the news when the first tower fell. I can still hear the fear in his voice, just a quiet, âOh my God⊠no.â Then we just sat in silence for what seemed like an eternity.
I had just moved in with new roommates on the first, and had a girl spending the night. My roommate burst into my room without knocking and said, âcome out here, youâve got to see this.â
Under normal circumstances I wouldâve been furious, but I could tell something big was happening
It was horrifying to watch, I was in school and the teacher turned on the tvs. They turned them back off after the first tower fell, but we all just kinda moved through the rest of the day in shock.
You guys stayed in school? They sent us home at lunch after they figured we werenât learning the curriculum that day. Watched the coverage all afternoon. Repeat strike and collapses of the towers. Idn why the news chose that âlast time in NYCâ vibed recap like it was a sweeps week 2 part story arc, but they did.
I was in school too but I literally donât even remember if they sent us home anymore. I just remember my first period teacher put the classroom tv on the news and we watched until the second tower fell. My memory of that day after watching that is completely blank.
This is a part of the reason we're so messed up mentally. I remember the Challenger explosion. After we saw it in class, we sat there for a minute realizing the people were killed. Then the teacher turned off the TV, and started our math lesson. No mourning, no therapy, no acknowledgement. Just "oh well, let's move on"
I remember hearing about the plane hitting the WTC on the way to school idly listening to the radio -- and then they mentioned a second plane hitting. I had very little idea of the ramifications of this at the time as I was like 12? I got to school and they had the TV on showing the towers burning live. We got to watch the towers collapse live, and the entire day (save for a couple short breaks) were just us watching the news and the teachers talking about it.
Some kids got picked back up and went home and didn't come back for a week (as if a small 2 room schoolhouse in the middle of nowhere, Missouri was a prime target for a follow up attack).
I was 12, too. I wasn't allowed to watch the news at home because it "wasn't for children", so I had no context when the RE teacher put it on the screen. I thought it was a film/movie and wouldn't accept assertions to the contrary until the next day, when I guess sufficiently many people I'd met seemed to believe it.
(I think people trying to convince me of things that weren't true was a common way of bullying at the time.)
When the first tower fell was when I realized how bad it truly was. I was only 14 at the time, I knew it was bad, I knew we were looking at at least a few hundred deaths, but I hadnât even considered that the buildings would actually collapse.
I thought the planes hit too high, that the worst that might happen was collapse of higher floors. I really didnât think we would see them just cave in on themselves like it was a planned demolition. When the first one fell I remember I was on AIM with a friend and asked him âDid they just really happen?â
Like, even though weâd been watching it unfold the buildingâs collapse just felt like it couldnât be real.
I was in my last year of college. I had gotten up early to finish some homework -- translating a poem from Latin. It was Horace. One of the Odes. The exact lines were:
Pallida mors pede aequo pulsat
Tabernas pauperum et turris regem
Which I rendered as:
Pale death knocks with impartial foot
At the hovels of the poor and the towers of kings
Then the phone rang and it was my roommate's mother to say "turn on the TV".
I will remember those two lines of Latin until the day I die.
That's beautiful by the way. You have a great way with words. Thanks for sharing. All I could do that day was go home and sob forever. Everything else seemed irrelevant. I couldn't put a coherent feeling or words to any of it.
I was a new engineering employee at an NPR station. The director of engineering gave me his credit card and said "go to the mall and buy every TV you can find and then bring them back and hook them up in every room."
It was a weird day. Lot of running cables while people stood around and stared.
Freshmen year of college. My roommate introduced me to GoGo with a station running it late night. Fell asleep to it and woke up to what I thought was an Aaliyah tribute morning show as the usual DC morning show hosts were very somber. When I got back to be room post hitting the loo, my roommate tolls me to turn on the tv (13 inch). First tower had been hit. Knock at the door. Hallmate coming back from early morning practice heard a weird report on the radio news and knew we would be up and didnât want to wake her roommate. We watched the second tower being hit live. Went to class 45 minutes later and then things were cancelled. Watched the towers fall around âlunchâ at the cafeteria styled eatery on campus. Drove past the pentagon that night as it was still smoking. Sent friends off to those wars who did not come back or came back missing limbs. Walter Reed was a nightmare. I entered DoD spaces in 2005 and still here.
That is so wild.
I was in 9th grade math class in Texas. Had no idea what was going on because the school wouldn't let the teachers turn on the tvs or radio. Eventually we were told what happened but i didn't understand the gravity of it until much later.
The gravity was felt when we saw the first tower on tv but the second impact live told us it was not an accident. And then more planes kept fallingâŠ
And a lot of my hallmates had family in military. The one who knocked on our door because she didnât want to wake up her roommate? That roommateâs dad was high up in the military and no one could get in touch with him. I joked he was probably with the president. Yep. He had been pulled for the ghost of Airforce oneâ only plane besides fighter jets and surveillanceâ and was with Bush. And that dad later said we never should have gone in the way we did. I still cannot believe Colin Powell lied to us.
Same and on PST. Roomates yelled at me after I woke up. "Terrorists crashed a bunch of planes and knocked down the wtc it's ww3!". Like that was the first thing I heard that day. Pulled the car over and cried a little on the way to work, some guy was waving a giant American flag on the side of the highway. No one knew what to do.
I saw the towers fall live on TV and I couldn't realize wtf I was looking at. I remember the news having that one zoomed in shot of the building's spire and watching it just fall. It took a minute to register what just actually happened. It was a wierd dayÂ
I had just started my last year of school in the uk (6th form) and saw the footage in a shop display (Rip Dixons) I didn't really take it in until I remembered my sister worked for the UN in New York. For some reason I thought the UN was based in the WTC and that's when I started. Panicking. Her subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan had been stopped and she had to trek back out along the train tunnel on foot. She was fine.
I had just joined the Royal Marines 5 days earlier. When I passed out of training 13 months later I was sent out to Kuwait after just 3 months on the job to prepare for the invasion of Iraq. I was just 21 years old and not even American.
Listening to the ATC archives of that morning, all the calls being made as the situation was communicated up the chain of command⊠it was interesting to hear some of their reactions to it being for real for real. Absolute professionals that are always level headed. Thereâs one guy that sticks out. When he asked âis this real world or an exercise?â and was told no this is real world and he goes: âokay, HEYYYYY, uh lemmie get you over to this personâ. Like it wasnât anything over the top and he really was still being professional but that little trepidation with that âokay, HEYâ was enough that you could hear his âoh fuckâ realization
I was a senior in highschool and both my mom and grandma were set to get on a plane to fly back to Michigan. It all started happenong and while I panicked, my dad wouldn't answer his phone and my mom wouldn't answer her phone. My favorite teacher (aka English) let me sit in her room and use her phone in between classes while I tried to reach anyone on a phone to find out that they were okay. Hours in I found out their plane had been grounded in Colorado and they ended up being stuck in Colorado for a week due to planes not being able to take off. Beyond that just the horror of it all.
The next day they brought all the local elementary schools together to sing The Star Spangled Banner and broadcasted it live. It was so mind numbingly, teeth chattering, blindingly awful... thats what I think about now. Sitting in the auditorium while we had to listen to the worst possible rendition of that song as we grieved.
I was in my first year of college and a friend called my dorm freaking out. She had woken me up and my brain just could not process what she was telling me. She was so upset because her mom was in NY near the buildings. My 19 year old not awake brain couldnât understand why she was so worried about her mom.
I got off the phone and was awake at that point. Kinda hard to go back to sleep after hearing your friend crying. So I turned on the TV just in time to see the second plane hit. I realized then why she was freaking out.
It was the largest foreign attack on US soil since becoming a country. It was worse than most single-day casualty tolls of the civil war, even (think a couple days of the battle of Antietam surpassed it), it was deadlier than the Pearl Harbor attacks that finally pushed us into WWII.
Being as geographically isolated as we are (relatively) and as military-minded as we are the US just doesn't get attacked at home hardly ever. Such a brazen and deadly attack was therefore shocking - not just to us, but to people watching around the world who knew right away the fallout would involve a lot of them.
My mom was at a meeting in dc my uncle was late for a meeting in the north tower and my dad was in kuwait and my grandpa was on a flight from Switzerland to new york for a meeting with Phillip morris America
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u/CaydeTheCat 15h ago
I was living in Silicon Valley working for a startup...4 years out of college. A college friend of mine on the East Coast woke me up at like 730a Pacific time and told me to turn the TV on to any channel and hung up.
Took my brain a couple minutes to wake up and realize this was for-real real.